Making Cauls for Instrument Repair and Luthiery Work

I wanted to give the Guild's dovetail a chance to dry out overnight, so I didn't do any work on it right away.  However, I did find some other trouble to get into.

If you do any work on guitars or other instruments that involves gluing pieces together, you'll have a need for a caul.  In the past, I've just used whatever random hunk of wood was lying around and adapted it to suit.

But after I built the neck removal jig, I realized how useful it would be to have a selection of cauls with cork on them.

So I cut up some of the aforementioned hunks of wood into actual shapes and glued some cork on them.  Lookit all the crazy clamping configurations!

Most of the cauls are rectangular, but I made also two cauls with angles on them, so I decided to face the angles together and clamp 'em that way.

Don't even try to figure it out.  But it did work.

Yes, the screwdriver was holding a chunk of cork down to a block of wood.  Seesh.

After the glue (just regular Titebond) dried, I cut some of the excess cork overhang off.

This is one of the two cauls with angles.  The top surface and the angle has cork on it.

Why an angle?  It was scrap with an angle cut, so I figured I might need that shape sometime.  Or not.

If you know what I mean.

Now over to the ROSS to clean up the edges.

I just bought some actual good quality belts for the ROSS.  No more cheap-a** Home Despot belts in the Dungeon.  Whoo hoo.

This is the last Despot belt I'll ever use.

And there you have it.

The one on the right is for holding necks in the vise.  I tried using a plastic caul and even heavy packing foam, but it's no good.  You'll wind up with dents on the neck.  I'm confident (he says hopefully) that the new caul will hold a neck and not dent it.